Nouveau NV50 Enables H.264 Decoding

A patch has been sent out by Nouveau contributor Ilia Mirkin that now enables H.264 video capabilities within the NV50 Gallium3D graphics driver for VP3/VP4 hardware.

The patch published ahead of the weekend is quite straightforward and builds upon the work by Ilia over the summer when he already enabled MPEG-2 and VC-1 video acceleration for NVIDIA GPUs with the VP3/VP4 engines. This change affects the GeForce 9300 series hardware as well as the GeForce 200/300 series GPUs and allows for H.264 content to be decoded using the Gallium3D VDPAU state tracker with this open-source NVIDIA driver.

Still to be tackled is seeing whether MPEG-4 acceleration will also work for NVA3+ (pre-Fermi) GPUs. The patch to enable H.264 for the VP3/VP4-based GPUs can be found on the Nouveau mailing list and could end up in mainline Mesa Git soon for the next release. The patch has also been proposed for backporting to stable Mesa releases.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the web-site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience and being the largest web-site devoted to Linux hardware reviews, particularly for products relevant to Linux gamers and enthusiasts but also commonly reviewing servers/workstations and embedded Linux devices. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics hardware drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated testing software. He can be followed via Twitter and Google+ or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.